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Techniques for collecting large vertebrate fossils

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Michael T. Greenwald*
Affiliation:
University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, California 94720
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Extract

When visiting the dinosaur displays in museums such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, or the United States National Museum of Natural History, one is overwhelmed by the abundance, diversity, and completeness of dinosaur skeletons. What is not obvious to the average visitor is that the majority of those skeletons are not from an individual animal. They are almost invariably composite skeletons containing bones from at least two individials, and many missing bones have been filled in with sculptured models constructed of plaster or fiberglass. How is it possible for paleontologists to reconstruct and mount these titanic skeletons? Perhaps even more fundamentally, how do such enormous fossil bones find their way to museums to begin with?

Type
Techniques for Megafossils
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Paleontological Society 

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References

LITERATURE CITED

Camp, C. L., and Hanna, G. D. 1937. Methods in Paleontology. University of California Press, Berkeley, California; 153 p.Google Scholar
Chaney, D. S. 1988. Techniques used in collecting fossil vertebrates on the Antarctic peninsula, p. 2124. In Feldmann, R.M., and Woodburne, M.O. (eds.), Paleontology of Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula, Geological Society of America, Memoir 169.Google Scholar
Colbert, E. H. 1968. Men and Dinosaurs; the Search in Field and Laboratory. E. P. Dutton, New York, 283 p.Google Scholar